Give us back Defense Speed

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All I can see now is that the Dev's wanted a hack and slash game, but were already so far along in developing this tower defense game that removing defense speed was the only solution. Traps as they stand feel largely useless (except for the Huntress' minefields). In every game I played yesterday, it never boiled down to traps, it came down to players fighting stuff hack and slash style. I would go play D3 if I wanted a hack and slash game. Towers that are fast and can wreck enemies are FUN.

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I actually prefer the change from a tower-defense PoV. This affords vastly more customization. The problem, as I see it, is that these customization options all come into play during the later game when we can be choosier with stats and spheres. Lack of attack speed in the early/mid game makes leveling a lot more obnoxious.

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They must have had an aneurism or something to remove tower att speed in a tower defense game.

Go check out Defense Grid. It's a pure tower defense game, and it does not have stats at all. Each tower has a fixed attack speed and that's it. In fact large parts of the game's strategy hinge on choosing fast but weak or slow but strong towers as appropriate for the attacking enemies.

Or Sanctum, which is an first-person shooter / tower defense hybrid. Again there are no stats at all, and the game plays just fine.

In other words: being able to increase tower attack speed is by no means a required part of a tower defense game. Now use your brain and think up new strategies that don't rely on negating game mechanics.

wow 2 examples out of how many tower defense games? negating game mechanics are you for real here, troll is troll do not come here being insulting and expect a warm welcome

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imo, removing defense speed was because it was causing weird graphical animations/glitches, as far as i know that's what trendy said, if they would continue to let defense speed scale you would start seeing really weird animations from the turrets, anyway, a way to fix this is to make it so every time you level up, you gain defense speed, just like you gain defense power (i believe it's +8 every level?) that way they can give us a relatively quick tower, but without the insane graphics/speed going on.

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DaMattGuy Steam Profile

Or Sanctum, which is an first-person shooter / tower defense hybrid. Again there are no stats at all, and the game plays just fine.

Sorry bro, but Sanctum is much more FPS friendly than Tower Defense, thanks especially to those slow arses who are basically immune to all damage until you shoot them squarely in the face with a sniper rifle. Not to mention that even the first stage of the story has 20 waves. 20 effing waves! Not the short and sweet kind of waves either! Also, the enemies change with every wave, but you can't afford to sell and build towers whenever thanks to very limited resources, which are only given out at the start of the wave I might add. There is no way to check what enemy types will be spawning until you're already in the match, but you cannot change your choice of guns and towers once you're in the match. With only a few spots for towers and just 3 for guns, you have to pick very very carefully, and if you did it wrong, it could mean a whole lot of lost progress. Punishing difficulty has never been and never will be enjoyable. (Dark Souls and Super Meat Boy are challenging difficulty. It's not the same thing.)

In short, Sanctum might be fun if you like First Person Shooters with some Tower Defense splashed in. Otherwise, I cannot recommend it to anyone, really.

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I don't disagree that the removal of tower speed was a poor decision. They removed it to get rid of some op builds. It feels like instead of fixing the actual issue the sweep it under the rug and those changes impair the rest of the game. Your other complaints though are nothing but annoying. You are literally complaining that a game that is not even in alpha testing yet has no content. They are still playing with things like defense speed and trying to see how they can make the game better than DD1. They already made DD1 why would they want to reinvent the wheel. They are creating new core game mechanics and seeing how players respond. The game is pre-alpha you can't be expecting tons of content. Sure in the future it probably will have tons of content and be much better than DD1 but right now it is in a trial and error state.

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wow 2 examples out of how many tower defense games? negating game mechanics are you for real here, troll is troll do not come here being insulting and expect a warm welcome

Those were the first two that came to mind. Here's some more that I've played: Orcs Must Die!, Gemcraft, Revenge of the Titans, the tower defense mod for Warcraft 3. Guess how many of those have a defense speed stat? That's right, zero. In fact, most of them have no stat system at all. The vast majority of tower defense games don't, and I'm fairly certain the DD series has the most complex stat system in the genre.

As for negating game mechanics: if you stack enough defense speed to make all towers have sub-second attack speeds, what else is that other than trying to work around the mechanic of different towers shooting at different rates? Negating mechanics (or trying to) is very prevalent in online gaming. In MMORPGs players are constantly trying to find ways to avoid having to deal with boss mechanics. This may be done through unintended use of abilities, exploiting bugs in the game, or simply being overgeared enough that the healers can heal through any of the boss's attacks. This is generally detrimental to the game as it trivializes the content and makes it boring.

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I don't disagree that the removal of tower speed was a poor decision. They removed it to get rid of some op builds. It feels like instead of fixing the actual issue the sweep it under the rug and those changes impair the rest of the game. Your other complaints though are nothing but annoying. You are literally complaining that a game that is not even in alpha testing yet has no content. They are still playing with things like defense speed and trying to see how they can make the game better than DD1. They already made DD1 why would they want to reinvent the wheel. They are creating new core game mechanics and seeing how players respond. The game is pre-alpha you can't be expecting tons of content. Sure in the future it probably will have tons of content and be much better than DD1 but right now it is in a trial and error state.

This was no small choice, and yes I do feel they removed content rather than fixed it if any thing we need different tower stats to provide choice, right now its a no brainier. With speed still there some towers might have benefited less from speed and more from crit at some point. And since when did the community ever give off the idea of removing tower speed during this alpha, in fact how did it even get past internal testing as a good idea? All I have seen is people wanting more ways to build, instead they remove and add a real money slot machine with premium pets, a linear lvling/gear system (more so than before).

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I don't think that the removal of tower speed by itself was detrimental. In the current implementation, the towers are too slow, especially the squire's. Enemies can walk all the way down the lane and start beating on my ballista before it even gets its first shot off. Since my 2-3 cannons are all single-target-overkilling the mob of enemies, that means that the squire's ONLY source of multiple-target damage is useless.

Thing is, this isn't so much a CORE MECHANIC issue, as it is a BALANCE issue. Tower base speeds need to be rebalanced, rather than just carried over from pre-patch.

On the core mechanic side, i've seen the idea floating around in several posts that something could be done to prevent the single-target-overkill nonsense. That would go a long way towards massaging the issues with tower speed on the squire.

-Stretch

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They raised the atk damage of Squires towers to counter it, especially the Ballistae. But... what they should do is just half ALL the tower dmg, but double the recharge/tower speed (or something like that). So same amount of damage in the end, but the game would honestly feel WAY better with a 2.5 or even 3 sec ballistae and a 1.00-1.5 cannonball, but they deal less damage.

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They must have had an aneurism or something to remove tower att speed in a tower defense game.

Go check out Defense Grid. It's a pure tower defense game, and it does not have stats at all. Each tower has a fixed attack speed and that's it. In fact large parts of the game's strategy hinge on choosing fast but weak or slow but strong towers as appropriate for the attacking enemies.

Or Sanctum, which is an first-person shooter / tower defense hybrid. Again there are no stats at all, and the game plays just fine.

In other words: being able to increase tower attack speed is by no means a required part of a tower defense game. Now use your brain and think up new strategies that don't rely on negating game mechanics.

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1) Some towers didn't have a crazy long recharge after shooting, but they are mostly useless now.

2) The targeting mechanism for towers wasn't so god-awful. The fact that a tower goes through a full recharge if the target it was going to shoot at dies... that hurts, and defense speed helped to lessen the pain.

Totally agree! This as well as

3) We should get some defense speed upgrade per level up. This way Trendy controls the base Tower Speed still instead of it being on loot, but right now the only way is spheres and they do hardly anything to make towers faster.

Towers are simply too slow and my flame bursts tend to not even shoot until the enemies are attacking them and I'm level 23 with a range sphere.

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1) Some towers didn't have a crazy long recharge after shooting, but they are mostly useless now.

2) The targeting mechanism for towers wasn't so god-awful. The fact that a tower goes through a full recharge if the target it was going to shoot at dies... that hurts, and defense speed helped to lessen the pain.

Totally agree! This as well as

3) We should get some defense speed upgrade per level up. This way Trendy controls the base Tower Speed still instead of it being on loot, but right now the only way is spheres and they do hardly anything to make towers faster.

Towers are simply too slow and my flame bursts tend to not even shoot until the enemies are attacking them and I'm level 23 with a range sphere.

that and with the monk boost only giving 10% my towers are shooting wetnoodles

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It's disappointing that you choose to view my post that way. Let me reformulate it as a question: why is having a defense speed stat so important to you that you generalize it as a critical feature in any tower defense game? Would you consider playing one of the many tower defense games that do not have a defense speed stat?

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It's disappointing that you choose to view my post that way. Let me reformulate it as a question: why is having a defense speed stat so important to you that you generalize it as a critical feature in any tower defense game? Would you consider playing one of the many tower defense games that do not have a defense speed stat?

Yes for a short period of time, complexity can add longevity, and why was there such a need to remove the stat? Not saying that tower speed is the only thing that can add complexity but more stats that change how you're towers preform can. Also they can change how much towers benefit from certain stats so you do not bulldoze past blockades.

(Thank you for reformulating)

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It's disappointing that you choose to view my post that way. Let me reformulate it as a question: why is having a defense speed stat so important to you that you generalize it as a critical feature in any tower defense game? Would you consider playing one of the many tower defense games that do not have a defense speed stat?

Lets make this easy. The "use your brain" part annoyed me a bit. Other then that I salute you my good man for wanting slow towers. For me it´s not that exciting.

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Lets make this easy. The "use your brain" part annoyed me a bit. Other then that I salute you my good man for wanting slow towers. For me it´s not that exciting.

I apologize for that bit. It was unnecessarily aggressive.

More than just slow towers, I want towers with a variety of speeds, and extreme amounts of defense speed removed that aspect from the game. Perhaps the speeds could stand to be increased a bit from what they are currently, but I'll reserve final judgement until I've reached max level and gained access to all of the spheres and stuff.

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More than just slow towers, I want towers with a variety of speeds, and extreme amounts of defense speed removed that aspect from the game. Perhaps the speeds could stand to be increased a bit from what they are currently, but I'll reserve final judgement until I've reached max level and gained access to all of the spheres and stuff.

Weeeell, don't reserve all judgement. Don't forget that with any game (especially RPGs), the end game is where most of the players will fail to reach. Having a properly functional progression before it is just as important, if not more so.

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Weeeell, don't reserve all judgement. Don't forget that with any game (especially RPGs), the end game is where most of the players will fail to reach. Having a properly functional progression before it is just as important, if not more so.

That is a valid point. Still, I have only played huntress after the balance change so far, so I can't say if the game as a whole is well balanced. The recharge speeds for huntress's traps seem okay at least. Yes, geyser is slow, but it's also massively powerful and often kills a whole bunch of enemies at once. Explosive traps aren't super fast, but they're cheap so I can lay down an entire line of them for nice fireworks.